The largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States has voted overwhelmingly to recognize Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide and to divest from Palantir Technologies and General Electric Aerospace over their ties to Israel’s military and intelligence services. A measure approved Tuesday by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) also calls on church members to boycott Israeli products and to lobby Congress for an arms embargo against Israel. This is the Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu Akel, a Palestinian American and former moderator of the Presbyterian Church who survived the 1948 “Nakba,” or mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding.
Rev. Fahed Abu Akel: “We have been silent on the destruction of most of the schools, universities, hospitals, mosques and churches — you know, one church was Orthodox, Catholic and also Baptist — all of which were done with our American-made weapons and dollars. Siblings in Christ, in the name of the living Christ, we cannot be silent on this matter any longer.”
Wow, an American church standing up for what’s right instead of what’s Republican?!
I did not have that on my bingo card for this century. Well done them.
PCUSA and other mainline Protestant churches (ex. United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ etc.) are fairly resistlib coded and have protested or rebuked Trump and his policies many many times through his presidencies. It comes at a cost because they’ve been hemorrhaging conservative leaning people offended by their positions on immigration abortion social justice etc. to conservative alternatives (ex. PCA rather than PCUSA) or to new and growing churches in the “Evangelical” movement, and don’t get replaced because people more on the left are more likely leave the faith entirely than to go to a left-leaning church. But they still do protests and whatnot anyway, you just don’t hear much of them because their share of the population is much lower and less loud than the very vocal Evangelical section.
Does you use of “ex.” above mean “example” or “except”?
As an example is what I intended, as there are other right-leaning Presbyterian alternatives than PCA such as Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Bible Presbyterian Church and so on so forth so I didn’t want to spell out PCA as the only one.
Gotcha. Might I recommend using “e.g.” instead to avoid confusion in the future?
There’s a lot of denominations under the “Presbyterian” name. Some of them are typical conservatives, but others are progressive, marrying gay couples, ordaining women and openly gay pastors.